Scientists tout 'open source' drug discovery

Applying open source methodology to disease research could speed up the process of drug discovery, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.

Applying open source methodology to disease research could speed up the process of drug discovery, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.

Senior lecturer at the university's School of Chemistry, Dr Matthew Todd, told Computerworld Australia that the current method of drug discovery is extremely competitive and mostly carried out behind closed doors to protect certain ideas and any commercial benefits down the track.

University of Sydney researchers are openly sharing their lab notes, primarily through a blog -- The Synaptic Leap -- as well as Twitter and Google+ and currently have around 15 contributors to a malaria project that is in pilot stages.

"Drug discovery is a complex process involving many different stages and the open source method has huge potential for improving the early phases before clinical trials have commenced," Todd said.

"It works to a certain model which involves research done behind closed doors where nothing is shared outside of an organisation, like a company or university," Todd said.

"Eventually, way down the line, the work is published and if there is something interesting in there, it's usually patented before it's published in order to recover costs otherwise others can just take your work and use it for themselves."

Todd labelled the open source movement as "transformative" and compared the way proprietary software development is carried out behind closed doors, in contrast to open source programmers that co-ordinate and share their code and ideas.

"What we're proposing is that while you're doing the work, you release everything onto the internet as you're doing it so everyone can see it and by doing that you allow people who are not part of your core team to input whatever they want, they can advise and they can get involved in the project.

"This is exactly the way the software works; it means anybody with a computer can help out and in the case of our project, anyone who is reading what we're doing and has access to a lab in particular can just start making molecules and get involved."

According to Todd, the whole incentive to applying the methodology to drug discovery is getting a result quicker, although no drug has been discovered using the open source method to date.

"If you've got a problem and you want to solve it you need a lot of people looking at it and basically our approach is exactly that, so if you want to solve a really difficult problem like finding a drug for malaria then you need more people looking at the problem and you can't do that if you work in a patent system where you're secretive."

There are numerous barriers to the adoption of the model, Todd said, all of which he argues are psychological.